Moving from high school to university lecture halls may be a bigger challenge than it seems. Freshmen are to encounter new people, a new environment, even often start living in a new city. Hitherto unheard terms are thrown at them, and most importantly: the responsibility for their studying lies entirely on them.

Credits, study groups, free courses. And nowhere is there a high school teacher who reminds you of everything three times and assigns homework every day to practice the study material. The shock when transitioning to the college can be quite large for a freshman. In order to better cope with this difficult period, student ambassadors at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of BUT have been helping them for already three years.

"Each bachelor's degree program or specialization has its own ambassador, who is a more senior student. We always discuss their nomination with the given institute as these should be students not necessarily with excellent results, but with trouble-free results, who manage their studies," explains Kateřina Růžičková of the Marketing Department of the Faculty, who coordinates the ambassadors' activities.

The inspiration here was the system that worked at the Institute of Physical Engineering, where second-year students helped their younger classmates. One of the volunteers was Jiří Spousta, who is now the official ambassador for students of the Physical Engineering and Nanotechnology program. "When Covid pandemics broke out, we set up something we called E-café for the freshmen of that time. It was supposed to be a compensation for the small café we have at the institute, where students of different years naturally meet and help each other. The goal was to advise and help freshmen during the pandemic, but also to just talk to them so the distance learning wouldn't make them crazy," Jirka recalls, adding that they sometimes invited some teachers to an informal "online chat".

For two years, Jiří Spousta has been an ambassador for about fifty freshmen who have chosen the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of BUT to study physics. He himself remembers that even for him the transition to college was difficult and he would have appreciated a similar partner at that time. "The hardest thing for me was the new way of learning, which is very much about an individual approach. I recommend to freshmen not to underestimate the beginning. Regardless if your approach to studying is good or lousy, it will be like a snowball: if I learn hard right from the beginning, eventually the snowball of knowledge will grow bigger, if I do not learn, there will be a huge snowball of problems at the end," explains Jiří.

Of course, the authentic experience of student ambassadors also includes less pleasant information, for example about subjects that are really challenging. "I tell them openly that in the first year there is a subject that has made a lot of people drop out. But I present it as a positive, because those who manage it usually complete their studies without any problems," says Jiří. And what has been the most interesting question he got? "If you have to be a genius to study this. The answer is no, you don’t have to. But you have to sacrifice something, it's not for free," he adds.

The work of ambassadors follows the natural cycle of the academic year. "Their role is mainly threefold: on the one hand, they provide counselling for applicants who do not know whether to choose to study with us and, if so, which program. These questions are usually addressed by ambassadors between April and June. This is followed by a crucial period from August to September, when freshmen need to go through a system of registration of courses, groups and understand all the new concepts. And thirdly, they are heard a lot with the start of the first exam period. In total, our ambassadors provided about two hundred hours of consultations last year," says Růžičková.

As already mentioned, this academic year is the third in a row when the system of ambassadors at FME works and during that time there has been a growing awareness of what they can help the new university students with. "In a 2021 survey, 42% of first-year students told us they had no idea about the option to have any consultations. A year later, it was only 6%, so we can see that awareness of ambassadors is growing," Růžičková confirms, adding that the faculty has included information about ambassadors not only on its website and social media, but also in materials for applicants or in Studius, where the name of a particular ambassador is listed next to the contact for their Officer for Studies. The survey also shows that 95% of freshmen rate a consultation with an ambassador as useful.

This year, about a third of the student ambassadors will naturally change as they completed their studies at FME. Jiří Spousta is also considering handing over the role at the end of the summer semester. "I'll finish the third year and then we'll see. I already feel that the subjects have changed, and so have the demands of the examiners and that I am a bit distant from the freshmen overall," he says. In the institutional café, however, he continues to meet his classmates, and the natural need to help each other probably will not leave him even after he hands over the role of ambassador to younger ones. "At the beginning, I myself was helped when one of my older and skilful classmates told me: Stay cool, I failed to calculate this either," Jiří concludes with a smile.